


soft to be strong

by stargazingcafe



Category: El Internado | The Boarding School (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, spoilers for the whole show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 18:50:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19836388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stargazingcafe/pseuds/stargazingcafe
Summary: Iván knows his life in three dimensions.





	soft to be strong

**Author's Note:**

> This stems from my attachment to the show and the way Iván's character was set out to exist ;;; also ,, too many feelings. It contains spoilers from the whole show so !! read at ya own risk !! I did not include any particular warnings because I don't believe there are any explicit ones, but. We all learn love differently--Iván's experience might resonate with some. We're not all so lucky, but we do get to learn new things and among those there is hopefully the ability to (re)learn love in its healthiest possible form!!

1.

  
Iván sees his life reflected on the tiles of this school. There’s always a faint smudge clinging to the wood and he acknowledges that there must be little difference between the image of orphans running in the corridors and that of abandoned teenagers heading to class. In fact, given the actual circumstances, every version of _La Laguna Negra_ looks the same. It’s in this school that Iván remembers first feeling a sense of stability; even if new kids entered and old ones left, there was always an Amelia. A Jacinta, an Héctor, a Fermín. An Elsa, even. All figures far bigger than himself that could combine and point a finger at a given direction, and leave Iván to fit the pieces together on his own. It’s in this school that life truly began.

  
_Your school,_ he hears his father whisper, six-year-old shadow looking up at his crouched form and expectant eyes. _This is your home now._

  
And though he’s always been aware of the nearly infallible scheme that hid behind his arrival at the school to get rid of the bought, unwanted son, he knows it is true.

  
He hates it, but he knows it is so.

  
It is in this school that loving people ever took shape—they became a constant in his life that Iván was programmed to reject since the very moment of his birth. Everything succeeding it taught him to cower and run, to play pretend in front of strangers that exuded joy and spoke of an indescribable union because _that is not our family._ But there was Carolina, letting him borrow her color pencils. And Victoria, sitting next to him at dinner; and Cayetano and Roque, tagging him along to every single adventure and backing up his every disaster. Amelia’s reluctance to yell at the teenagers because they were once her children and she was incapable of seeing them under any other light. Jacinta, in the way her eyes crinkled up when he asked her a question not meant to be asked; Fermín letting him and his friends eat extra portions of his croquetas at breakfast, preparing loads and loads more when they felt sick and always accompanied by a wink. Even Elsa, sneaking kisses in the corner of Héctor’s mouth in the hallways. There has been love in every corner of this school, waiting for Iván every time he was willing to hang his coat of sorrows at the front door. As he grew older, he trained almost with the same vigor he did karate to dismiss the little displays of affection that threatened to wrap around his shoulders.

  
He hates it, but he’s never known anything else.

2.

  
Maybe it hit him when he was twelve and kicked a soccer ball to Cayetano’s head and made him cry despite his complains that he was too old for _"tanto teatro."_ He can’t be quite sure, and sometimes he doesn’t remember if it was the soccer game or the sound of the fire crackers that he and Roque put under Elsa’s desk on Halloween, but what he know is how it him that there was a life, if only a fragment of a burnt picture, that existed before this school.  
He had the nightmares before even knowing he was having them. At first, he thought they were bad dreams, the type that made him feel uneasy when he woke up; no remnants or faint images that could follow him to the waking world and clear the path to the past for him. It took Vicky, the equally inquisitive yet more patient of the two girls, to pin down the origin of Iván’s inquietude and ask what could possibly be triggering it.

  
In retrospective, Iván would have preferred to leave that vault unopened.

  
It was in the slightest of commotions that Iván discovered his nightmares laid. Elsa talking too harshly to a student, Jacinta frowning deeper than usual, doors slamming in the dorms corridor. Iván stopped learning the basics of gentleness and warmth and could no longer fathom the existence of a home in which a warning wasn’t followed by a slap and a slap by a threat, and in which hiding under the beds was not a game of hide and seek. Cayetano’s cries and Roque’s voice urging him to run while crackling sparks filled the background plunged him into a house with fancier stairs and wider rooms. Marbled kitchens and carefully painted doorframes, none posing a scratch, flooded his eyes; in this house there is no dirt, no disorder. No laughing, panting kids, no adult voice reluctantly sending them off to clean their rooms with no real edge to their tone. This house is void of it, the subtle hints of mirth peeking out here and there, full instead of contempt and doubt, the lingering questions of love and belonging hanging in the air as if by a thread; walking in this house is walking barefooted on shattered glass. Iván thinks, hard, and he finds pity at the bottom of his mind when he realizes that it is all too familiar. He thinks, this type of love he doesn’t remember.

  
And every morning, when Carol kisses Vicky on the cheek to say good morning and Amelia sings to the children as they hold onto a rope and head outside, he thinks: this type of love he doesn’t know.

  
He thinks someone’s heart must be breaking for him.

3.

  
When he meets María, it doesn’t feel like homecoming.

  
Technically, he is home. A place he’s forced himself to resent, a routine he’s identified as malicious. A scheme, a requirement from his father to save himself the bruised knuckles and wrinkled forehead. It is the same food, the same classrooms, the same harmony that loops itself around his neck.

  
He meets María and there is nothing new under the sun.

  
Except for his AB negative, a medical record with a picture of a sixteen-year-old attached, and a prank gone unpunished.

  
/

  
They stare at each other, standing in that classroom, one pushing for tenderness and the other for recklessness. Reversed reflections of each other they are, distorted mirrors showing that love nurtures us differently.

  
Sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes not at all.

/

  
The next time María sees him, she knows that the kid with the mischievous smile and arrogant stance carries a scar in his belly, a ghostly reminder that the busted lips and teary eyes are not his to keep. A single, isolated message that translates into _I’ve loved you. I’ve just seen you, a fleeting moment in this nightmare, and I’ve loved you then._ María holds onto the permanence of that scar, knows that she didn’t name her son but that his body once fit inside of hers. That she didn’t hold him and smile but that his eyes crinkle up in the corners when he laughs like hers do. That he was snatched away from her hands but that they both have a mole in the back of their necks in the shape of a tear. And once she sees his father, she desperately hopes that that message translates into _You’re not like him. You’re not tied by blood. You don’t even look like him—you look like me._

  
_You look like me._

  
No, she didn’t name her son. But Iván is the closest thing to a self-portrait María has. And even if there are more things to it than this, there’s no one who can look at Ivan’s smile and explain why it curls up that way but her.

  
/

  
It catches Iván off-guard. He sees María every day, in the hallways, in the dining room, in the kitchen. He hardly misses her—she is always there and with an ever-present fixation to help him. Iván recognizes that his tortuous day-to-day has steered away from normal, and yet when he sees María, life is still toast with butter at breakfast and a scratched knee for gym. It is not the freakshow that follows him into every safe room, nor the fear that paralyzes him every night at the forest, nor the dread that breaks his hand into a bricked wall at the bottom of a well. For the snapshot of time that he stops and sees María, he breathes a little.

  
When she cleans up his hand and he calls her mom, it briefly occurs to him that he doesn’t have the right to tease. But María smiles shyly in return and there’s not a cloud of smoke where his stinging remarks stand in the way of the other person looking at him. A thought sneaks into his mind, forgetting to close the door behind it.

  
This type of love feels his. It feels easy, despite it not being so.

  
The thought visits him whenever it wants to, and it is particularly pushy when Iván crawls back to her. In the maid’s bright eyes, the word _chacha_ only winks back because it is the word he uses to refer to her. Iván finds concern and affection inside of them, and every version of himself in her is good.

  
He hates it, knows she’s wrong to assume that he is more than the carcass of hollowness he’s known for sixteen years.

  
But he’s a little afraid, a little hesitant, when he goes to sleep and thinks that she will wake up the next morning and not wish him a good day. Get up and leave her job.

  
He hates it, but he takes it. Because unlike his friends, he knows there is someone who will heal his hand and get him out of trouble while talking him out of skipping class.

  
/

  
When Iván finds out—really finds out—he doesn’t think he’s always known; he did believe his father’s fraudulent stories, did accuse María of everything she’s been running away from. He hasn’t always known, but when he reads the papers in Noiret’s safe, he barely has a moment to feel the sigh of relief abandon his body and lighten the grasp it had over his chest.

  
It’s as if the valve closing in on his heart has released its grip and began opening.

  
/

  
They sit across from each other in that room, hands pressed against glass. He’s saying sorry, and even through the reflection he sees what she sees: a good kid.

  
Reversed reflections of each other they are, distorted mirror showing that love nurtures us differently.

  
Iván catches a glimpse, if not a fleshed-out image of a thirteen-year-old María, depending on the decisions of a boy who erratically pushes a handful of bills into a man’s hands and doesn’t look back. Iván is a little ashamed, and a little frightened, to learn that love has made its way to her, but not to him. But then his sight falls back into focus and he sees that she is saying sorry, too. And Iván knows that if she had raised him instead of his father, he wouldn’t be seeing another sixteen-year-old making confining decisions for María reflected on the glass.

  
He also judges by the smile on her face that she is not seeing the Iván that snickers at her and calls her names while laughing contemptuously, but the Iván that sits in front of her with tears burning down his eyes, and he thinks maybe that’s the Iván he is and decides that’s the one he wants to be.

  
/

  
There’s a moment in Ivan’s journey, right through his disease like a blade through his throat, that he remembers even when his mind tries to pry his friends away from his memories. It happens when he’s pushed nearly everyone away from him, when Cayetano no longer cries and Carolina no longer sings and Roque no longer exists for him the same way. There are no soccer games and no Halloween pranks and Paula’s giggles are the closest thing to joy that seeps into the crevices of a building falling apart from the grime and plague. It happens when Vicky storms out of every room and Julia hates the sight of him and Marcos fears the day he will stop remembering they’re friends.

  
Iván sneaks into the kitchen. He doesn’t mean to, aware that tensions are high, people apprehensive, and that he’s falling back into the habit of crawling to María after scowling at her because he needs help. Everything is quiet, the sound of dying souls lingering in the air.

Iván knew he would grow up in that school, but he never got to fully reconcile the idea of dying in it as well.

As he treads quietly inside, he hears muffled sobs and hushed whispers, and stops at the doorframe to see Jacinta and his mother’s face buried in her arms, which sit atop of the table.

  
“—And I know I shouldn’t be this scared, because he is the one losing his memory, but… What am _I_ going to do? What if he forgets _me?_ Who’s going to look after him then?”

  
You have to share more than genetic composition in order to prioritize others with duplicate fierceness. There’s an Iván for a Julia, but there’s also a María for an Iván; and people are not interchangeable, but there is a honesty in mother and son when sacrifices are in order that stems from those who are born at night and look for the sun.

  
(María likes to say that Iván was born facing the sun.)

  
“He is not going to forget you, would you stop saying such ridiculous things?” Jacinta sits beside her, deep frown on her face and hand resting on the younger’s shoulder.

  
“—It took too long to get to where we are now and—What if he just forgets I’m his mother?”

  
“ _He won’t._ ”

  
Iván’s first instinct is to burst into the conversation and warn her that she has no right to tell what’s happening to him, but there’s something in María’s next sob that reminds him of her figure sitting behind a glass panel and sitting alone in a car at night that paralyzes him. He realizes that this is not about him, even when it is. This is about his mom, and how they’ve gotten here; he can’t ditch the memory of her because she’s been looking for him in all the hollow spaces.

What happens next still happens: he still cuffs her hand to the mattress and kisses her in the cheek and runs away and feels guilty for things other than letting Rubén take Paula. He comes back and falls asleep on the brink of death and lets his mom kiss his forehead. Letting these happen is easier than telling her that this type of love, the one he knows through Julia’s eyes and his mother’s laugh, is the hardest thing he’s ever had to let go of.

  
(Julia thinks about the boy who pours medicine in her drink to get her to live another day, the boy who gets off the bus home when Paula goes missing, the boy who puts his life on the line for Marcos when there is but little life in him and the line only grows thinner, the boy who will sneer at his mom one minute and pepper her with kisses the next, the boy whose mood inevitably changes color and who would rather close himself off from the rest of the world than let others see him crack not because he’s ashamed but because he thinks love is a burden that they have to carry for him. She thinks about the people she’s met and all the harm they’ve done. And every time, she smiles at María and concedes that yes, Iván _was_ born facing the sun.)

  
/

  
“I know that you don’t know honest, pure love. I know that you’re not used to it.”

He thinks about himself. He asked Carol to be his girlfriend, but he pulled her hair as he uttered the words. Vicky is his best friend, but he’s spent years ignoring the fact that she was once in love with him. Roque was like a brother to him, but he never hesitated to throw an _enano_ or _pequeño_ at his face. He was angry at Carol for kissing Marcos, but he had kissed Vicky not many summers before. Julia is his dictionary definition of love, but he couldn’t stop mocking her encounters with the dead. Every relationship in his life is conditional—he loves people, just not flawlessly. It is not the love his mom talks about.

  
“But _nené,_ I love you. And it is that honest, pure love. And I know I’m not done telling you everything about the utter calvary I’ve lived, but you’re the greatest, prettiest thing to have ever happened to me,” María grabs his neck gently. “Iván, you are the best thing I’ve ever done.”

  
Iván thinks about the words she told him not long ago: _deja que la gente te quiera._ Let people love you. Thinks that he preferred to pull Carol’s hair because it was easier to have her say no; thinks that never acknowledging Vicky’s feelings would make them disappear, all the affection too big for him to fit into it; thinks that calling Roque names would make him the lesser friend; that ruining his relationship with Carol was enough to make her stop loving him. And pushing Julia away meant that she would not have to care for him. No burdens.

  
But his mom is hugging him, and love is not a burden; and when he kisses her in the cheek and tells her he could never forget her, he sees that it is not a heavy load for his mom to love him, despite how hard he’s made it. And he decides that that’s the love he’ll keep.

**Author's Note:**

> maría calling iván nené caught me in the sad end of the spectrum. i needed to hear iván calling her mom more ;;
> 
> stream sweet child o' mine to keep the memory of iván noiret's character alive <4


End file.
